


Cantigas de Amigo

by Enjoyex



Category: Dark Souls (Video Games)
Genre: Early music, F/M, Female Chosen Undead, Musicians, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-08-12 21:53:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 22,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7950523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enjoyex/pseuds/Enjoyex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Chosen Undead, defeated innumerable times at the hands of Dragon Slayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough, awakens locked in a cell. Unarmed, but consumed with the need to seek out her fate nonetheless, she resolves to escape her prison at all costs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The thing about being kept in a cell was that no matter how many times it happens, it doesn’t get any more bearable. The woman figured she would have, at the very least, gotten a little more used to prison. The undead asylum was a festering shithole, and she was there for months before she finally escaped with the help of that ill-fated knight.

Compared to that, this place should feel like a palace, and technically, she _was_ inside a palace. Or perhaps it was a cathedral. She wasn’t too certain on that point, but surely a dungeon that was near to civilization was a step up from one that was isolated. Then again, calling Lordran civilization was, admittedly, being generous.

Her cell was in near total darkness, save for a thin horizontal line of light she could just make out if she peered through the bars. It was low to the ground; probably a gap beneath a door at the end of a hall.

There wasn’t much in her cell aside from three walls of solid stone, the fourth being an equally unrelenting wall of iron bars. The floor was stone, and the ceiling likely was, as well. There was a ratty blanket, too, but it was small comfort to someone who didn’t sleep. It was a moth-eaten, moldy thing; more holes than blanket, really. It may very well have been from a time when the prisoners kept here were able to rest.

She flexed her sinewy fingers, dried out from the humanity draining from her body when she last fell in battle. Those two were ruthless. She was no stranger to death, but this kind of frustration at her shortcomings was new. The worst part was that those myriad deaths did nothing to strip her of her motivation to continue what she had begun. Even if the gods did not have hollowing in store for her, that did little to change her current situation. She was sick of having to face centuries of lucidity locked up, awaiting the end of days.

She sat on the ground. Like outside, the stone was cold. Here, in the gloom of what could only be assumed to be a subterranean dungeon, it made good sense, but out there, under the brilliant, late afternoon sun, it felt wrong. Paradoxical. She supposed it had much to do with the coming Age of Dark. Was even the sun losing its warmth? It seemed only bonfires had even the faintest trace of heat in this land.

The last fire she had sat before couldn’t be far from here. Certainly, she had been dragged, unconscious, to this cell, but she felt that she must still be in Anor Londo. The stone felt just like that that lined a hidden room she had discovered behind a fireplace, it was true. Yet, even more than that, there was something about the air, both in those god-sized halls and in this small, small cell, that felt the same. She could feel a faint hum in the dusty marrow of her bones. She just couldn’t dismiss it.

She had a strong conviction that if she escaped, she could easily make it back to where she was. It just didn’t seem like that escape would be possible.

She wished for the umpteenth time that she could take her own life and be done with it, but they were not so foolish as to leave her the means to do so. Even her own clothes had been stripped away and replaced with a gown: something without any metal pieces. She could no longer starve herself now that she was undead, either. That just left bashing her head upon the wall of her cell, a possibility she did not exactly relish considering. There was no guarantee it would kill her. She might incapacitate herself permanently without dying, and then where would that leave her? Here.

She could afford to be patient. Like all undead, time was one thing she had plenty of. As long as she held onto the purpose of “escape,” she would be fine. She would give herself a while to formulate another plan. Breaking her skull like it were some eggshell... yes, that would definitely be “plan b,” though she had no idea what “plan a” might yet be.

It was highly unlikely that anyone would come to check on her. There was no reason to. She was locked up securely. She had abused the bars that enclosed her as much as she could manage with bare hands. They were truly battered from it, and all she had accomplished was to prove that, as expected, she couldn’t bend iron. And the lock, frustratingly, was just beyond her reach. She could just brush her fingertips against it by forcing her wrist between the bars at an awkward angle. Any further would cause the bone to snap, and then her right hand would be no use at all.

She rubbed her fingers over her nearly exposed knuckles on her opposite hand. It was true that no one would have reason to visit this dungeon unless they were to throw in some other troublesome undead, but that could take years for all she knew. They didn’t need to feed her, clothe her, or empty a chamberpot the way jailers did for their fragile captives back in the lands of the living. A stiff breeze would cause them to die of hypothermia! No, simply waiting would not do at all.

But perhaps there was some way she could _make_ someone come over to her. If she screamed all day and all night, that might be enough to attract someone. Undead may not fall so easily to death by disease, hunger, or cold, but that did not mean that they weren’t susceptible to anger. There had to be someone who would be able to hear her, if she could see light not too far away. She was certainly capable of creating a nuisance of herself, and if whoever finally showed up killed her, all the easier this would be.

It would be a little more difficult if they did anything other than that. She got up from the center of the cell, grabbed the blanket, and moved to the back of her cell. The door would have to be opened if she were out of reach, but a well-placed arrow would also do the trick.

She folded the blanket a few times to make a sort of cushion against the floor and took a seat. Well, for something that could take hours, if not days, there was certainly no time like the present.

She sat up, straightening her spine and creating as much space in her chest cavity as her shriveled lungs and diaphragm could make use of. Posture was the important part of the process of amplification of the voice. She opened the space in the back of her dry mouth and throat so that the noise would resonate. She took a few deep breaths to warm up. In, one… two… three… four. Out, one… two…three…four…five…six. In, hold…out, slowly. And again. She closed her eyes and she screamed.

And she kept screaming. She was quite good at it. She took small breaths while her lungs were still far from empty, making sure that if there was anyone listening, they would not get a moment’s respite.

But, gradually, the irritation in her throat and lungs grew. Being ground into cobbled streets by massive hammers more than once, the sensation couldn’t be described as pain, exactly. It was like a slight burning, but it didn’t even approach the feeling of having her clothes set aflame by torches and pyromancy. She had probably been screaming for around half an hour now.

Before the first time she died and came back, she distinctly remembered that she would have called this “pain.” She had sung at feasts for hours, left unable to speak above a whisper for days afterward. There was a clicking sound coming from her vocal chords. Rather than dissuade her, it reminded her that a scream this loud _must_ be drawing some sort of attention, and redoubled her efforts.

By what must have been hour three or so, it was difficult to hear the volume she was screaming at for the ringing in her ears. This had to be a good sign.

She thought on what exactly she would do if her cell was opened. Wait until they approached her at the rear wall? The space she was in wasn’t particularly deep, seven feet at the most. Still, it would be out of range for an arm, even one belonging to any of those abnormally tall, silver-clad knights that prowled about.

She could rush whomever showed up as soon as they entered the cell, but that was risky. She didn’t have the element of surprise on her side. Anyone with half a mind was bound to be wary of her ploy to get someone in here with her, and a sudden charge was probably the most expected tactic of all. They would also be well aware that she was armed with nothing but her fists and teeth.

If she grabbed them by their ankles and refused to let go, or put all her strength into fighting them, they might kill her. She was not wearing anything that would protect her from a sword strike. That might be a little too much to hope for. She was beginning to doubt that they would be so lax as to kill her after having taken the time to remove even her pinned robes.

Her position in the back of the cell would draw them in, maybe to beat her into silence or cut out her tongue. They would not hesitate to close and lock the cell door behind them to prevent her from sprinting out. She posed no threat to them, with or without an escape route. Soon, her screams became ones of frustration, curses against the gods for trapping her here in their city.

Her throat and upper chest were rattling now. Her voice was definitely not as loud as when she began, but it was not for lack of willpower. She continued to use the muscles of her abdomen to move air with great force, but her shrieks were simply not forthcoming. She would have to take a break if no one were to come soon. She could only hold out for another hour at most. It was naïve to think that just because she could ignore physical discomfort, she would be able to scream for days. She had other limitations, even if she couldn’t sense their boundaries any longer. She slammed her fists on the stone floor.

How could this have happened? She was stuck here like a rat. That’s how they saw her: vermin that scampered along their walls, stealing their leftovers. She wasn’t a threat. She wasn’t even a person. At least the hollows of Lordran attacked her out of desperation. Humanity or not, there was still something human about them.

She couldn’t hear much of anything apart from her own wailing. She was starting to lose confidence in her current plan and was close to abandoning it in favor of considering another, when the tiny light she could see from her cell exploded into a blinding flash. Unable to see, she was briefly startled into silence, but picked up soon after. Someone had come into the prison block. The first person she had encountered in days.

“Shut up.”

The command echoed inside of a helmet she could not see. She could barely make out the dim blob of a silhouette against what, for all its brightness, could have been the sun. Her hands shot up to shield her eyes from the light.

She lowered her hands, squinting her watering eyes to get a better look at the owner of the exasperated voice.

But just like that, the door was once again slammed shut, leaving her in a pitch darkness even deeper than when she had first been shut in here.

Progress.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dark Souls has so few fanfics, so here's a poorly written one! This is just sort of an experimental chapter to see if anyone has any interest in this kind of thing.
> 
> I have a tumblr, too.
> 
> enjoyex.tumblr.com (NSFW)


	2. Chapter 2

The force of the door being slammed shut was enough to cause a tremor to rattle the bars that ran the length of the hall. As her eyes took their time to readjust to the darkness, she thought of the voice that remained in her mind.

Tired. Annoyed. Yet, she would not describe it as angry. Anger was what she needed if that figure was to throw her cell open. Annoyance could build into anger, yes, but how long would that take? Certainly longer than her own voice would hold out.

The voice was slightly tight, but not grim, and not threatening. It belonged to a man, that much she could tell. Her brief glimpse of his silhouette was not enough to make out his identity, but seeing as his frame did not do too much to block out the light from beyond the door, he was probably not a giant. A good thing, too. She doubted very much that she would be able to overwhelm one without a weapon.

She would need to bring him back, upset him more somehow. She could continue screaming, provided she gave herself breaks regularly, but surely uninterrupted noise was more effective in drawing out a reaction. She gritted her teeth. Even if she wanted to, she knew she wouldn’t last long if she kept up the way she had been. Whether she had the _perseverance_ to do so wasn’t the issue. It was a question of ability.

So when it came down to it, there wasn’t much of a choice. She would scream for a half hour, and rest for an hour. She estimated the past eight hours or so were not particularly kind to her vocal chords or lungs, and if she were to lose her ability to shriek, she wouldn’t have much to work with.

Eight hours…

To be honest, she had thought that it would take much longer to get someone to even notice her. Did that mean that there was a guard just outside the cell block? Were she to be left entirely alone, she could not escape. Perhaps they meant to prevent someone from coming _in_. Someone who could break her out.

Few humans could make it to Anor Londo, but that didn’t mean there were none who could at all. That good-spirited fellow, Siegmeyer, had made it, after all. Maybe he wasn’t as reliable as she would have liked when it came to fighting, but there was no doubt in her mind that he wanted to help her. It was not her intention when she assisted him to make him feel indebted to her, but it certainly couldn’t hurt given her predicament.

And Solaire, the man from that great bridge, was here, as well, and had brought with him his same easy and generous temperament. His attitude had certainly seemed confident, if his motives were a bit unclear. His very own sun, was it? She would have thought he had meant it metaphorically, had it not been for the curious way he had stared, unblinking, at the actual “wondrous body,” high in the sky. A strange one, no doubt, but the desire to come to others’ aid that he had expressed was unquestionable.

Two potential allies were better than none, even if they were… a bit unique. She supposed you had to be at least a little eccentric to make it through such trying times. A jovial adventurer who needed a bit of helping along and a kind-hearted, genuine knight with a rather odd way of thinking: of the people she had met, they were certainly the ones that seemed most worthy of her trust, if not necessarily her confidence.

Seeing that she had no idea where she was, it was unlikely that they knew that she was trapped. It was even less likely that they would be able to guess where it was she was being held. They had their own journeys, and their own goals. It wasn’t as if they were trying to follow where she was going, and she doubted that this dungeon was anywhere too obvious. It would be nothing short of miraculous for them to happen upon her.

Maybe drawing over a guard wasn’t the right way to go. After all, they had a reason for her to remain in her cell, alive. The man, disgruntled though he may have been, must have had strict orders not to approach her. If he had wanted to stop her, he probably would have at least come to her end of the hall. He couldn’t have expected to intimidate her by telling her to “shut up” from that distance, barely above a normal speaking volume.

As an irritant, screaming was just about the most effective thing she could do. The thing was, it wasn’t only humans that could do it. Hollows grunted and hissed plenty, everyone knew that. Wasn’t there something else?

Yes. It was on her way back from the malarial marshes of Blighttown. Down below Firelink Shrine, rising up from a shroud of fog that nary a ray of light could penetrate were the crumbling ruins of a city. She had heard wailing in the distance; a pained, unearthly sound that shook her to her very core. Those were not the cries of someone who had their wits about them.

Would her potential rescuers not think the same of the sounds emanating from this jail? True, she had not begun her onslaught of screeching to catch the attention of allies, but that didn’t mean that it couldn’t also serve that purpose. It wouldn’t help her much if they were convinced it was just some poor soul, long since stripped of their sanity, expressing deep lamentation in the only way they could. They had to be made to know that she meant them no harm, and that she was one of them.

There was a way to let them know that she was human. It came with risk of drawing the suspicions of her captors, but what choice did she have? They wouldn’t come in and gag her, or anything to that effect. That would have to involve opening the cell. The most concerning thing was that there was no way to predict what exactly they would do. They hadn’t been overtly sadistic in any way so far, but barring her actions from today, she hadn’t given them a reason to. They couldn’t kill or grievously injure her. That only meant that they would have to be more “creative.”

Safety concerns aside, she hadn’t performed in the courts of lords and princes to train for this… escape tactic, whatever it could be called. Her arsenal included an, albeit weakened, voice that could be projected better than that of the average person, knowledge of tunes and lyric verses from a number of lands, and a persevering spirit. Hopefully, those would be enough to draw the attention of someone. Friendly, if possible.

Her plan operated on the assumption that hollows did not sing. She had seen a few exhibit startlingly rational behavior, given their situations. It was uncanny, sometimes, to see a corpse-like figure, which by all accounts should have no memory of a human existence, grip a memento from its old life to its chest.

Still, none of them seemed to be able to speak. Whether they had sentiments beyond a hunger for souls buried within themselves or not, they would never be able to voice them. That privilege belonged only to people like herself, who kept the flame of hope alive, no matter how small. This ability to communicate was her edge. From a distance, words were no different from unintelligible ramblings, but strong variations in pitch should carry decently far.

Though she hadn’t exactly been preserving her voice, singing wouldn’t have as high an impact on her as screaming. She would be able to sustain song for much longer before taking a break. It wouldn’t reach the same register, and would not cause irritation in the immediate area of weakness in her throat.

She picked up a tune, paying little heed to the lyrics that would be lost in the distortion of distance. The sound that came forth was rasping, but nonetheless distinguishable, which was all that really mattered. It also did not fill her ears from within her head in the same way as shouting, making it possible to hear what was going on around her.

It didn’t take long for her to hear the restless footsteps of someone pacing outside the corridor. She heard the sound of a lock unlatching. It gave her enough time to stop singing and cover her eyes in anticipation of the blinding light. This time, she would get a real look at who had entered. Her sight was impaired only briefly before her eyes could focus upon, she assumed, the man from earlier. His face was totally obscured, but atop his helm were two wing-like flanges.

Like last time, he remained far away from her. He addressed her in the same commanding, slightly irate voice.

“You disobeyed my order, prisoner. Now, you will face consequences.”

Evidently, he had respect for the chain of command, because he left her immediately after delivering the threat. He was probably consulting with his superior, which meant that, at least for a moment, the door was unguarded. Even if he possessed the key, it might be enough time for a human to notice her.

She knew a few bawdy drinking songs from Catarina, and some chivalric ballads from Astora. She sang with a renewed vigor, praying to any fickle god that would listen that one of them would reach a comrade. Please. Please hear her plea.

If that guard’s captain was half as merciful as she expected, her lips would be sewn shut. She had seen a fellow performer, a young man with a honey-sweet voice and all the sense of a headless chicken, have a burning firebrand forced down his throat when he joked about supposed penis size of the miserly lordling they had been performing for. Their entire troupe had been dragged from their beds to bear witness to that act of senseless cruelty, a warning to nameless entertainers without the ability to do a thing. It wasn’t his screams that had haunted her nightmares up until the day came when she no longer slept. It was the smell of seared flesh, so like pork that even now the scent of the roasting meat made her retch.

She heard them. Heavy, clanking footsteps. Two pairs of feet. How likely was it that her two acquaintances had met up along the way?

One set of armor grinded against itself, distinctly louder than the other, which sounded as though its weight was held gracefully, as though its wearer was well-accustomed to it. The increasingly familiar intonations of her guard’s voice was muttering to the other, his superior. Her withered organs made an approximation of churning, dread coursing through her empty veins. Had she any water or bile in her stomach, it wouldn’t have been there for long.

The sound of the latch seemed harsher than it had before, now containing in it the implicit promise of violence. Solaire and Siegmeyer hadn’t heard her. It would be foolish to hope for mercy now. The moment they opened her cell, she would have to act. The odds may not be on her side, but she liked to think that, perhaps, some lofty ideal was.

She needed her eyes more than ever now, so she protected them again from the shock of changing light intensity. One of them, the higher ranking one, most likely, would remain outside her cell as the other came in. They would catch her if she tried to make a run for it. She could attempt to seize her guard’s weapon, but if the struggle lasted more than a moment, the other would come to his aid. The door was starting to open.

Think, damn it! Think and do something!

She saw them. First came her silver-clad guard, and just behind him was… was…

Someone she had seen before. Many times. The secret wish in her heart that maybe, just maybe, this visit would be anything but what she feared it would be became as nothing. The snarling visage of his leonine helm was no façade. Behind it lay eyes no doubt gleaming with real malice.

They had entered the hall. They were walking towards her, pace steady as her heartbeat deafened her. Her guard flipped through a key ring, searching for the one to her cell. _Clink. Clink._

They arrived before her and paused, making no move to the stubborn lock she had nearly broken her wrist to tamper with. Two knights she might have been able to take, but _this_? She didn’t know where to begin with this. She huddled in her old blanket and tensed her muscles. This was it. This could be her only chance. Even if it wasn’t, if she failed now they would maim her. She loathed to think of how, given her firsthand experience with his capacity to do her harm.

“Prisoner!” She flinched at the voice that had left her unfazed before. “You will remain silent unless Captain Ornstein addresses you. You will not turn your back on him. Disregard these instructions and your punishment will be more severe.”

She allowed her gaze to travel up from the two pairs of armored feet to the two figures, each more than two full heads taller than her. That red, red cloth lay limp against the back of his neck. A coldness entered her body as she looked into unseeing, hammered eyes. They were distractions, meant to lead astray from where his face truly hid. A monstrous mask for an equally monstrous person.

“I assume you remember me.”

She had not heard his voice before, and her resentment flared at how easily he addressed her. It was a sickening noise, like a dying animal. She wished a thousand thousand painful deaths upon its owner, a fitting retribution for what had been done to her, what was about to be done.

“I am told you are quite the little songbird. I must say, it's flattering that you would want to entertain us.”

Had he not been too far away, she would spit on his gleaming, brass armor. A proud peacock like him ought to be brought to earth like her brethren had been.

“But, for some reason, I find myself doubting the purity of your motives.” If there was no warmth in his sarcastic tone before, surely now it was like slivers of ice.

“Now, you will explain to me what it was you were trying to accomplish.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shout out to Onion Bro. I love that guy.
> 
> enjoyex.tumblr.com (NSFW)


	3. Chapter 3

Her head was with filled cotton, pressing on the backs of her eyes, not doing a bit to help her focus in coming up with an appropriate lie. All she could think about was the chafe of her rough spun flaxen garment against her back. Before she could notice what she was doing, she had pressed herself against the rear wall of her cell, making herself small and squeezing the cloth between the stone and her skin. She did her best to control her breathing, so as not to betray her mental state. Best not to appear even more pathetic. She was pretty sure her current status in the eyes of her captors was roughly that of an insect.

As the wave of panic-induced energy began to subside, she noticed that neither the captain nor the guard were moving towards her cell. Just before, they had implied that her punishment would be corporal. Evidently, _that_ and getting information out of her would be separate affairs. That should make this… well, if not easy, then certainly not as difficult as she had been convinced it would be.

The guard stood at attention to his captain’s right, facing him. The set of keys was in his left hand, securely out of her reach. Darkness and damnation!

“I know you can speak.”

The captain's voice cut through her lapse in attention, her eyes darting back to the unnatural placement of the face set into his helm. Even through the layers of frosty detachment, she could hear his contempt for her: a tiny thing cowering before her better. She felt a building fire within her breast, her anger its fuel. She rose a challenging gaze to his helm, mouth remaining stubbornly shut in contrast to her many hours of making noise.

An unusual, grating sound came from inside the gaudy suit of armor, like the high-pitched screech of metal grinding across metal. Abruptly, he rose his hand and slammed it on a bar at his waist’s height, clanging against it. Bright flashes skittered down the bars to the floor and across them to the walls.

A searing sensation shot through the woman’s legs from where her bare feet rested on the floor. It was so sudden, she couldn’t suppress her grunt of pain and surprise. It was like when she was fighting them, unbearably hot lightning burning her. Burning her skin, her hair, her clothing and armor. That spear, driving into her belly, her bones, trapping her underneath its weight, sending shocks not unlike this one, boiling her vital fluids with temperatures hotter than white coals.

Like cold water, terror smothered her defiance, dousing her heart in the murky depths of instinctual fear.

“Do you feel more inclined to answer now?”

His hand still lay upon the iron crossbar. An ominous sight combined with a snarling, animalistic face, the image of which had been burned into her memory long before now.

She worried at the inside of her leather-like lower lip with her teeth. It was unlikely that there was anything he _wanted_ to hear, other than the truth.

His fingers clenched around the bar.

“No-o!” Her voice cracked on the vowel, throat constricted from exhaustion and stress. “No... I-I mean yes! Yes, I’ll answer.”

That dreadful armored hand relaxed just slightly, but its unchanged position was a constant reminder of what would happen should she fail to comply again.

“I had…” She had not yet formulated a good lie. Every possibility that flitted through her mind seemed a waste, each less believable than the last. They all relied heavily on empathy, a trait she knew he lacked with respect to her. But, given the situation, anything was better than nothing.

“I had hoped to fortify myself against the hollowing.”

He did not urge her on, opting instead to tap his foot against the ground rhythmically. Metal against stone. The sound reverberated in the space, echoing throughout. It was a sure sign of impatience, but he didn’t act on it. Not for the moment, at least.

“It was my hope that by focusing my mind upon my previous existence, among the living, it would delay the process.” She hoped that she sounded sincere. That she did not want to go hollow was certainly not a lie.

His foot stopped tapping. Was that a good sign? Or did it bode ill?

“I am aware humans are prone to this affliction, but that does not explain your previous actions.”

“Previous actions?”

This time, it was the silver knight that spoke. “Use your head, prisoner. The captain refers to your infernal screaming.” Ah.

“It… That was, uh. Well, it shames me to say this, really, but, consumed with dread on account of my condition and a strong despair, I took to mourning.” She hesitated. “You might call it a bout of hysteria.” The ridiculousness of those words was so painfully clear, surely they would see through the lie in an instant.

Her captor appeared to deliberate on this, covered face downturned in thought. The air was thick entering her lungs in those few, tense moments. To her racing mind, each second was like an eternity held in suspension over deadly spikes. He lifted his head back to her.

“Somehow, I am not inclined to believe that.”

Once again, he tightened his grip around the bar it rested upon, sending a wave of punitive lightning to be conducted through the cell. She lifted her feet away from the stone, no doubt some sort of metal ore, but her clothes did little to protect her this time. The muscles of her arms and legs contracted involuntarily.

Balled up, she fell to her side, face hitting the uncovered ground. Pure agony, like a splash of boiling oil, shot through her eyes, the slightest amount of remaining moisture in her body acting like a lightning rod. Unbidden, tears came forth from their ducts. She blinked hard, less to disguise her weakness than to make sure there would be no additional water to act as a conduit into the most vulnerable part of her body.

She sputtered and coughed, a small amount of brownish blood coming up along with her spittle. She struggled to raise herself from the floor.

“The truth. Now.”

If it weren’t just about the most stupid thing she could do, she would tell him to fuck himself and his truth. A spasm caused her fingers to jerk instead.

“Fine,” she muttered. “The truth is, I had hoped someone would come over.” The knight let out a mean-spirited laugh.

“Did I not say as much, Captain?” he declared triumphantly, but became quiet when his dear captain raised a hand to silence him.

“You meant to seize the opportunity to escape.” It was not a question. Did he not know of the others in the city? _Were_ they still in the city? Were they even still alive?

Back in her sitting position, she lowered her eyes. They couldn’t be dead. What was she supposed to do now that the jailers were on high alert? They had to come. They had to!

The pointed fingers of his gauntlets rapped against the unyielding iron.

“The song you were singing… What was it?”

“What?” she asked, confused. Why did it matter? Did he have any knowledge of human music? His kind had not been much in contact with humans over the past several centuries. His story was more myth than history to her living contemporaries. It was unlikely that he had even passing knowledge of human music, or the divisions of human countries, for that matter.

“The lyrics. Recite them. We have a witness here. I will know if what you speak is false.”

Or so she hoped.

It was a song from Astora. A story of a noble maid, a princess, raised under the careful tutelage of a nun of the Way of White, just as her parents had been. Her wet nurse was the constant companion of the maid’s mother, and the two women raised their children as close as two dear friends were of wont to do. However, the wet nurse and her son worshipped false idols, those that only reflected the brilliance of the sun, rather than Lord Gwyn himself who emitted that holy light.

And, she continued in verse, the two, the maid and the strapping lad, grew fond of each other, as youths often did. It was a love pure and true, differences doing naught to dissuade them from the affair. But the king, her father, sent his daughter’s love away with heavy heart, having great affection for him but knowing that it must not be. He told the court and castle that he had died nobly at war, building an elaborate tomb to complete the ruse.

The maid fell into despair, and would see no one, not her mother, nor her nurse maid, nor the nun, her teacher. Not until the day when her love returned, the halo of the sun lighting him from behind, signaling his acceptance of the faith, and they were united in matrimony.

She recounted the story wholly without tune, but kept the rhythm of the song, preserving it as it was meant to be heard at least somewhat. When she had finished, she folded her hands in her lap and hoped that the word Astora and the name Solaire meant nothing to her captor. Perhaps it would not be terrible if he understood the concept of chivalry, however. To respect even enemies should they be at your mercy.

“A tale I am unfamiliar with, but not one that I see particular harm in,” he admitted, as if frustrated that their contents revealed nothing. The lyrics said nothing of location, direction, or captivity. Indeed, they bespoke deep faith and adherence to the Lord of Sunlight in favor of all other pursuits. After all, her intention had not been to convey information. It was a simple alert. She expected news of other humans in Anor Londo had not yet spread.

He turned his head to the knight to his side who awaited his orders.

“We are done here,” he told him. “If the prisoner acts up again, notify me without delay.”

The knight appeared to want to protest, but instead simply replied, “Yes, Captain.”

“And you.” The woman kept her eyes downcast, not wishing to receive more punishment for insubordination. “I was lenient this time. Do not expect me to be so forgiving should you have another lapse in judgement.”

“Prick!” she thought at him viciously. Much as she didn’t want it, she had his attention now. It would be unsafe to try any more escape tactics for the time being that relied so heavily on others. When they left, she would begin her inspection of the cell for any inconsistencies. The lock may be out of reach, physically and metaphorically, but the rest of the cell was hers to inspect.

The pair finally turned away from her, armor clanking as they did so. The guard escorted his captain out down the hall, the darkness swallowing them up before they made it out. The keepers of the dungeon seemed to have a policy of leaving those within to rot in body and mind, content to kill them for the last time once they had fully hollowed. Now that she had made such a commotion, they would not leave her indefinitely, but, with luck, this would be the last time she would see either of them for the next while. If it were her usual guard alone, even, she would accept that and work with it.

The only problem was that luck had not been on her side in the recent past. Not at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story in the song is (with a few tiny changes) a popular Medieval romance, Floire et Blancheflor.
> 
> enjoyex.tumblr.com (NSFW)


	4. Chapter 4

She had spent enough time in the cell to know now that everything about it was deceptive. The rock it was hewn from had seemed like any other gray, nondescript stone you might come across on the road. That was proven to be but a mistaken assumption; it was to trick prisoners into lowering their guard. No one need open the cell when it had such a conveniently built in torture device.

The bars were the same. That they trapped her in here was not bad enough, it seemed. They had to contribute to her suffering in some other way.

Even the blanket. The blanket was nothing but a false promise. Cruelly reminiscent of a mother’s comforting embrace, it could do nothing to insulate her from her physical suffering. All it could do was cover her face to grant sightless oblivion.

But, if there was more to it than met the eye, there had to be something about this highly manipulated space that she could make to work in her favor.

She had waited long enough. Her limbs were stiff, as if plaster freshly set, and they felt as though they cracked and crumbled in protest of her moving to stand. So instead, she stayed upon her hands and knees, crawling to nearest corner adjacent to the rear wall, running one hand along the perimeter of the room by the floor. Blindly, she felt her way towards the other rear corner, the smooth surface unmarred by features of any kind.

Edging forward, her head hit the wall perpendicular to it. Nothing. Not on this wall.

She continued her investigation towards the bars, only to be disappointed again. Once she regained some strength, she would reach higher. For now, she resigned herself to the distance her arm could reach while prostrate.

Her hands fell upon the bars. They greedily leeched the warmth from her hands, feverish as they were from recent abuse. The injury still fresh in her mind, she hauled herself along, and the bars that formed the door to her cell creaked from the strain of her weight upon them.

There were horizontal bars as well as vertical. The blanket…

She could tear it into strips. A noose would be a kinder end than her previous presumed method of a bashed skull. It would be much more viable, but now that she knew there was a guard, one who was now listening to any noise she might make, it was doubtful that the inevitable loud thrashing would go unnoticed. She would have to wait until suspicions died down and she could find an opportunity to act. For now, there was another wall to investigate.

Another smooth wall, but there was something she realized about the bars, at least. That had to-

Wait. Wait. What was this? She laid her hands against the mysterious object she came across. Metal? A grate! Desperately, she clawed at it. How large? Would she be able to fit through? If it was to let air into the dungeon, it had to lead outside. What other purpose could it possibly have?

She tried to pull at it, gently, to test if it had any give at all. But her nails were brittle, and one split from the end to the bed, leaving a jagged crevice from which blood seeped. Unperturbed, she licked the drops away and went straight back to testing the grate. She felt along the edges. Even emaciated as she was as a symptom of her hollowing, her shoulders would be too wide to pass through.

She had thought she had had just about enough of bars, yet here she was, truly ecstatic to find more. A smile broke across her corpse like-face; it would surely be an eerie sight had anyone been in here with her.

The spacing between the slates of the grate was narrow, more slit-like than the openings in the cell bars, but her thinnest fingers could fit through to their second knuckles. The passage beyond the cover was no wider than the grate, but it felt rougher, almost cement-like. She scraped at it with an undamaged nail. It flaked off easily, from either age or lack of maintenance. That must mean that the ore that carried lightning from _his_ hand was a veneer.

She lay down, stomach flat upon the floor, and tried to see into the space behind the grate. There was no light coming through, even from the distance, which was no surprise. There was no draft to speak of, and the air smelled just as stale as everywhere else, so it couldn’t lead outside. What could it possibly be for, then?

She passed her fingers through the cover again to sweep along the sides. The grate felt like metal on both sides, nothing special about it. Just beyond it, on each side, there were two, slender rod-like objects, also of metal. And while the floor and walls of the small space were of cement and the same width as the point of entry, she could not reach an upper bounds to it. She retracted her hand and rolled onto her back to try and get a better look up into it from a low angle, but it was simply too dark to make anything out.

It was dark, but… was there noise coming from somewhere? Yes, it definitely sounded like there was a distant creaking from high above her head, and it was without a doubt coming from the space behind the grate.

It stopped, as if whatever was making the noise had noticed her attentive listening. She sat up and backed away to sit upon the moldy blanket in the back of the cell. There was no harm in being careful. Lately, she had been anything but, and it hadn’t done her any favors.

All she had accomplished was to bring over that man: Ornstein. He had stood in her way, and like others before him, he had struck her down. Unlike those others, he had had many more successes at it. He, and the one he fought beside. Though she loathed to think of the dragon slayer’s name, it was to avoid granting him the acknowledgement that he had proven he did not deserve. Her hesitation to think of that foul executioner came from what she knew of him from before their first encounter.

Though both were granted legendary status by the holy books, the executioner was always spoken of with great scorn; a man who grinds the bones of his human victims to season his food, a heinous practice even to the gods who thought so little of the race of man. A tale to frighten disobedient children and nothing more, she had thought. He would prowl village roads, walking upon rooftops and looking into windows. If he saw a child resist their mother, refusing to sleep or eat their supper, he would come after them, but he wouldn’t eat their meat. Only their bones. The sheer ridiculousness of it made her laugh, even when she was young. How very wrong she had been.

The first and each time thereafter she laid eyes upon him, he was armed in cumbersome plate, shaped like a man with a stomach distended from gluttonous eating habits. Whoever crafted it had a sense of humor. A dark and questionable one, to be sure, but she found jokes of that type were more amusing to her as of late.

His helm, strangely enough, matched his partner’s in their uncomfortably similar sets of false eyes. Yet, their fighting styles could not be more different. Slow, deliberate, backed by unfathomable strength and agile, with a tendency to fool the enemy with a variety of tactics. They complemented one another well, she had begrudgingly admitted to herself what felt like so long ago. But she was just as steadfast now, her heart unwavering.

She knew what lay behind them, and she had not given up on getting it. She would not resign herself or those she once knew to the curse. Not while there was still breath in her. Not now that she _knew_ a way to reverse it.

And yet here she was, trapped, unable to act on her convictions like so much ash. How dare that snake throw her in this cage? Beaten to the edge of consciousness, restrained, eyes covered, and dumped in here to rot. Defeat made her blood boil, but this was not defeat. This was a blatant admission of disrespect, of dismissal, and worst of all, it had done more to impede her than dozens of blades to her back.

So how could she put aside her hate? Rather than face her head-on, they would prefer to swat her down like a fly. Did they not know their goals were one and the same? Surely, they too wished for the return of the Age of Fire. Well, she was less than sure about the executioner. A devourer of men might have wholly different wants and desires from someone like her. But the other, the one her silver knight guard reported to…

He thought of her, or more accurately, humans, the same way he did the dirt under his feet, or less than. But he saw in her some sort of threat, she knew that now beyond a shadow of a doubt. Her guard went to _him_ , not the executioner when he was suspicious of her. And had he not, then, appeared here without delay? Perhaps he was the one to have her locked in here, and not only because she was an unwelcome annoyance. They both knew she meant to kill them, or at least to get past them which would have meant one and the same. She had not been roundly smacked to the ground those last few times she had gone up against them. He knew she wasn’t some nothing, some nobody. He had a purpose to fulfil, but apparently, he wasn’t about to die for it.

That’s why she was here, after all. Not here, in this dungeon, though it had been all the world she had known now for weeks on end, but here, in Anor Londo. To claim the Lordvessel and return to Firelink Shrine, and to succumb to no obstacles in her way. And because of that she was here, in this cell, where she was locked away to await the end of the world. But she wouldn't do that.

She curled in on herself, wrapped her arms around her legs, gaze cast out to the hall, empty, save for vermin, and dark. She wouldn’t let anyone catch her on unawares. She would bide her time. She would find out what was going on with that grate. She would get out of here.

She would slay Dragon Slayer Ornstein. She would execute Executioner Smough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Too cheesy? NOT CHEESY ENOUGH?
> 
> enjoyex.tumblr.com (NSFW)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay.

It was no easy feat to estimate how much time had passed in here. Whether the light at the end of the hall was from daylight, she could not say. And even if she could, it would matter not a bit, for the sun in Anor Londo was constant.

She couldn’t base it upon sensations of hunger or tiredness, either, so she did her best to judge based on her own boredom. If she had grown sufficiently frustrated about not doing anything, that was as good an indication as any that she should be safe enough to move around again.

Well, it certainly _felt_ like a long time since she had found the metal grate and first heard the noises coming from it. In the time she had spent half-sitting, half-lying on the blanket, she had closed her eyes and tuned her ears toward the right side of her cell. Every once in a while, there was another sound that came from high above, and at one point, it was quite loud.

She didn’t trust those sounds. Not for a single second.

She suspected _he_ thought it was quite amusing, tormenting her in this way. It was ironic that his armor was so immaculately polished, considering that the man it contained was slime. Her skin still prickled from that lightning, more irksome than painful at this point. It felt almost like a slight rumbling…

No. That was not the thrumming of leftover pain from torture. That was the feeling of the ground vibrating. Something was moving.

She heard it, coming from the beyond the grate. A far-off screech, like a pained wail. It was not a familiar sound; it was far too high-pitched to resemble any human or animal she had ever encountered. And the comfortable distance between her and the noise was slowly, slowly shrinking.

As it grew closer, it rang in her ears, piercing inside her head in the most foul way possible. Its sheer loudness was quite enough to make it unbearable, but whatever was making the noise was stuttering, halting, and grinding along its descent, assuring that the assault on her senses was always fresh.

She pressed her hands over her ears harder than was necessary, knowing full well that they could only do so much to block out the noise. It was an irresistible bodily reaction to volumes that could damage her sense of hearing, such was the degree of the accursed din.

Without removing her hands from her head, she dragged herself, still seated upon the blanket, one foot pulling her a few inches forward, then the next, over to the grate. The metal cover was rattling on its hinge, the clanging of metal on stone a cacophonous accompaniment to the continuous screech.

Was it safe to put her fingers though the spaces in the grate? Surely not. To do so would be idiotic. Organic or not, whatever was in there had less than a fraction of a fraction of a chance to be harmless. If it did come down as far as where she was, which she was quite convinced it would, it would have to halt once it hit the floor. That would be the best case scenario.

The subtle rumbling of the floor of the cell was increasing with the closeness of the sound and whatever was making it. It felt very close, perhaps no more than twenty feet above her now. The noise was so deafeningly loud, the air itself must be vibrating from it. There was a slight moisture on the palms of her hands. Were the walls truly shaking this hard, or was that her own body?

The noise reached its peak when it was just behind the grate, right in front of her, then ground to a halt. She released a breath that had caught in her lungs and become stuck there.

She hesitated to pry her hands away from her ears, as if the noise would suddenly start up again.

It did not.

Her palms were slicked with sweat. At least, she hoped it was sweat and not blood, but she could not see to confirm. She ran a finger through it, and it lacked the same stickiness.

She looked to the grate, now totally silent. The vibrations in the room had subsided. It was as if whatever had just occurred had not happened at all. Was this some sort of trap? If she reached in there, would she lose a few fingers?

Well, she had better use a finger that wasn’t particularly useful, then. She opted for her left pinky.

The bottom of the space was covered with something metal, the cement no longer within reach. It was flat, and coated in a layer of rust. The noise of rusted metal against metal. That’s what the screeching was.

On top of it was some sort of rounded object. It felt almost as if it were… wood?

But her investigations were interrupted by the sound she found she was growing to resent above all others, even that of rusted metal shrieking in protest: the unlatching of the lock at the end of the hall.

She scrambled away from the grate. She was not sure why she did, for whoever was behind that door, captain or guard, should be anticipating that the awful noise from before would draw her attention. She made a silent prayer to the forgiving daughter of Gwyn that they did not think what had just happened was caused by any action of hers. No response she could give would satisfy their anger if that were the case.

A stray beam of golden light reflected off his armor, the polished set, landing just outside her cell. It bounced away just as quickly as it came as he moved to turn and shut the door behind him. This time, the dungeon was not cast back into full darkness. He must have a lantern.

A single set of footfalls, still silent for the weight they held up, approached her, and with them the jailer, face fully covered as it was before. The cell across from her own was alight for a scant few moments. It looked much the same, but she caught a glimpse of the telltale glint that flashed near the bottom of its right wall.

Rather than turning to face her, he kept right on past her cell, the red plume on his helm swishing to and fro like a cat’s tail in time with his uninterrupted stride. Her mouth dropped open in surprise, and she found herself fighting off the urge to approach the bars and see where he was going instead. She satisfied herself with leaning over, craning her neck to see if she could get a better vantage point. She saw further down the hall, but not by much. The other cells were barely illuminated, shadows moving like restless spirits on their walls.

He was past the point she could see when he finally came to halt. She recognized the sound of more reluctant metal, its shrill complaint travelling through the walls to the grate not far from where she was sitting.

It popped open on its right side, and the leftover momentum made the miniature door swing slowly on its hinge with a creak.

Whatever was in there had little and less chance of being anything good. A sense of foreboding curled in her stomach, settling into a coil like a serpent.

His footsteps were coming back towards her now. There was no way he would ignore her this time around to crawl back into his hole. Lions did not live in burrows, it was true, but he was definitely more of a weasel than a noble creature such as that. A hole was appropriate.

He stopped in front of the bars of her cell and set down his lantern, out of reach of any brazen, grasping hands. Then, he straightened back up, so he could look down at her more fully.

“Well, then. Get what I’ve sent you.”

Utterly presumptuous and horribly irritating. At least he was living up to her expectations. She wasn’t about to set him off just as a show of defiance, so she slunk along the wall over to the grate. The smart thing to do would be to make well sure that there was not some sort of wooden bear trap in there, if such a thing existed. The half of her mind that was ruled by pride, however, compelled her to hold her gaze upon the man as she reached her hand into the space to take hold of what was inside. She trusted him about the same amount she did whatever this mysterious “gift” was, so she may as well keep track of the one that could move on its own.

She gripped the rounded object, flat on one surface, and pulled it into her lap. She finally broke eye contact to look at it. It was…

It was a lute.

A lute with a plectrum tucked between its neck and its strings.

It was unlike any lute she had seen before. It was inlaid with mother of pearl and the tuning pegs were of smooth amber. The wood, too, had clearly been a beautiful color when it was well-oiled. It was not something to be played: it looked more like a decoration to hang in a superbly opulent room. She ran her forefinger across its belly and rubbed what dust she had picked up against her thumb. It was almost gritty, like it had been left in the open and not touched for at least half a century. She expected it had been even longer than that.

“What is this?” she finally managed to ask, her voice wavering slightly. If she didn’t know better, she would have said she heard a clipped chuckle come from inside the helmet.

“I think you can tell by looking at it.” Her hold on the neck of the instrument tightened. That wasn’t what she meant, and she got the impression that he knew that. Was that his sense of humor? Spiteful condescension?

“You’re a minstrel, are you not?” She held her tongue. “It is no matter. I know that you are.”

She could not tell what his aim was in saying this. She expected it was a way for him to assert his position, but at the same time, it was an unusual approach he had opted for. It would be much simpler and more direct to send a bolt of lightning through her.

“Play it,” he said, pointing a finger down at the lute in her arms. She was spending so much time open-mouthed these past few minutes, surely she must look like a fish. She shut her jaw.

“Excuse me?” She wasn’t sure she had heard that correctly, because it _sounded_ as if he had just asked her to play this ancient lute, the strings of which were as dry as her own gut, or so she imagined. Whatever animal they were taken from was probably so long dead, its bones like as not turned to dust by now.

“Play that lute. That’s why I suffered the noise of that contraption.”

 _That_ certainly set her jaw on edge. Oh, _he_ was the one so bothered by the shriek of rust stripped from metal. It was not as if he could easily walk away from it. She ought to apologize for having the audacity to make him send the lift down in the first place. But instead…

“What would you have me play?” she asked, her voice as mild as she could manage, given the circumstances.

May as well give him what he wants. If it made him feel as if he were more in control, or whatever it was he wanted out of it, it could do no real harm. The alternative was not likely to be something that she would enjoy. She began to bite away the chipped end of her broken nail so that it would not get caught on the strings while he took the time to decide.

“I leave it to you. I imagine the songs you are familiar with are quite different from the ones I am.” He sounded flippant, taking on an airy tone that would make him seem disinterested, were it not for the fact that he was the one who had sent the lute down here in the first place.

She removed the plectrum from its rather haphazard place of storage and, with it, plucked at one of the strings. It was a wonder the string hadn’t snapped the moment she did, because it felt as though there was a brittle casing to it. She needed to tighten the pegs to tune it, but it was unlikely the strings would survive.

She had to try anyway. Perhaps a primarily vocal song would do something to hide the quality of the lute’s timber. She twisted the pegs, and to her surprise, the strings crackled, but held fast. Whatever song she liked, was it?

The low light beside his feet flickered, the tiny flame the most striking thing she had seen in a long while. A melancholy fellow, all alone in a place like this, yet still fighting, still struggling to live with what little oil it had to feed on.

The sound of the lute was as true as it was going to get without any real maintenance now. She knew what song to sing, of a place far from here, of a distant time yearned for.

The little flame danced. A time unattainable.

 _“Mia irmana fremosa, treides comigo_ ,” she began, hands coming alive upon the frets and plectrum of her instrument.

“ _a la igreja de Vigo u é o mar salido_ ,”

His breathing was steady, and his hand lifted up to rest upon the bars. Had she done something to incite his temper so quickly?

“ _e miraremos las ondas_.”

She did not give pause... nor did he shock her with lightning. He was being, for lack of a better word, civil. It was a strangely calm moment. Her hands moved across the strings with exaggerated delicacy, and her voice was quieter than normal for its tiredness. For a fleeting moment, she felt as if some semblance of normalcy had returned to her existence. But, the feeling disappeared before she could consciously acknowledge it.

“ _A la igreja de Vigo u é o mar levado_ ”

It was in her best interest, of course, for him to think nothing of her at all. For whatever reason, he had decided it was advantageous in some way for her to play music for him. Did he think it would help him figure out why she had been singing earlier? She didn’t know.

“ _e verrá i mia madre e o meu amado_ ”

She did not know why, but he appeared to be listening very intently. The ever-present snarling expression on his helm served poorly as a way to see into his frame of mind. His real face, and real thoughts, were an enigma.

“ _e miraremos las ondas_.”

He did not seem the type to smile, but perhaps, at least, he was not scowling.

Her hands slowed to a standstill. He didn’t say anything for a little while, longer than was a natural span of time for a lull in speaking. But then, who was she to rush her own jailer?

Eventually, he cleared his throat and removed his hand from the bars.

“Yes. That will do for now.”

For now? Had he not come down here to test her in some way? It may be that he intended this to be some sort of long-term strategy to break down her will. If she were asked _how_ exactly he intended this through ordering her to play a lute, she wouldn’t be able to answer, but…

“I will take my leave.” He picked up the lantern. She was sorry to see it go.

“I will return later with strings for the lute.”

Instead of walking away immediately, he hung the lantern up on a hook on the wall dividing two cells opposite her own.

Then, he was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Super rusty dumbwaiter fun times.
> 
> We're getting into the meat of the matter. The real bread and butter of the story. The proverbial sandwich, if you will.
> 
> I tried to find a link to the version of the song I wanted, but it's not on youtube! That shit ain't right.
> 
> enjoyex.tumblr.com (NSFW)


	6. Chapter 6

She collected her thoughts and assessed what she had to work with. An open lift that was too small to carry her and that was inoperable from her position. The blanket. Her clothes.

The lute.

She had used the blanket to wipe away some of the dirt that had been sticking to it, but it was still far from how it must have looked when it was new. The differently colored stripes of wood were dull, and the white lines of paint that ran the length of the belly were peeling.

Though not unexpected, it was a shame that no one had taken care of it. It didn’t seem that there were many people around, much less anyone that would be inclined to maintain an instrument of any kind.

He had told her that he would bring back strings for it. She didn’t know where he would find them in a place as deserted as this. Well, it wasn’t really her concern. He was free to do as he liked. And if what he liked included making her perform for him without recompense, she wasn’t in a position to complain.

She had been trained to play from a young age. It was a job that kept her fed and clothed, and she supposed she was fortunate that she had seen more of the world than the run-of-the-mill nameless, unwashed peasant. Music wasn’t exactly cutthroat, but it had helped her out of a number of binds… away from Lordran. This was no tavern bet against a bandit. A hollow was about as likely to be tamed by the singing voice of a maid as a wild beast; it made a fanciful story, and that was all it did.

The undead who _could_ speak and had the inclination to do so with her did not seem overly keen to hear any songs. These were no battle-weary soldiers who could forget their troubles with enough to drink, if only for a night. And even if they did want such a thing, what would she get from it? Payment in souls? The very idea!

But this man, her personal feelings for him aside, seemed very interested in her talents, indeed; perhaps _too_ interested for her to be entirely comfortable with the situation. He hung on every note as if he were a man starved. The way she had performed wasn’t even particularly good. In fact, it was quite bland, much like bread soaked in milk. The first meal for someone to eat after weeks without sustenance. It was suitable in that way.

It was painfully evident that musicians weren’t a common feature of Anor Londo. Or at least, they hadn’t been for a long time. Music must be hard to come by. All manners of entertainment must be short in supply, for that matter.

Even the sternest of men grow weary of inactivity. She had conveniently made herself known as something that could alleviate his boredom.

No. That couldn’t be what all this was about. But then, it would be fortunate if her jailers put from their minds the songs she had sung to attract her comrades. It was no skin off her back if a bored little man spent his idle hours forcing her to perform for him like some trained animal. It shouldn’t bother her in the slightest. It would be absurd to waste her energy on such sentiments.

Yes. Just. Absurd.

She raised the lute above her head as if to dash it upon the floor. For a moment, she held it aloft, suspended in the air, wondering if the temporary relief from her frustrations would be worth the punishment of electrocution.

Perhaps not. She lowered her arm and rested the lute on her lap.

As much as she resented her treatment, and loathed those who had brought it upon her, she knew better than to aggravate them. It would only bring her undue suffering, and beyond that, it couldn’t hurt to have someone see her as anything other than a troublesome insect.

Surely “entertaining” was a step up from “annoying.” It had to be. Definitely… Maybe.

As irksome as it felt to be considered as a marvel by someone she truly detested, she couldn’t deny that it opened up more possibilities to her.

It was not so different from catching the attention of a courtier, save for the fact that she was in a jail and not a court. She need not worry about inciting the jealousy of any of her fellow minstrels with gifts of money and trinkets here.

The Dragon Slayer was no courtly gentleman. It could have been that once he took up residence in the Divine Court of Gwyn, but that was so long ago that courtly manner nary applied to the shell of the city that remained. All its gods and goddesses had long ago abandoned the place, their presence here a faraway dream. Probably only the constant sun truly recalled what Anor Londo used to be.

It was little more than a barren wasteland now, a desert, just like everywhere else in this godforsaken land. There were no animals, as far as she could tell.

No animals. So how did he expect to find lute strings?

Evidently, it was taking quite a while. She could tell it had been a few days, for her broken nail had grown back. In all likelihood, it was more than just a few. He was either vastly overconfident about his ability to find rarities, or the strings, and she, were low on his list of priorities. Both seemed likely, and she couldn’t exclude the possibility that both factored into the delay.

She wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not.

Presumably, he could not threaten her physically from a distance, but he was also providing her materials and information about her prison when he _was_ here. None of it seemed to be of exceptional use save for a blanket with which she could hang herself… for now. Who was to say whether he would unknowingly give her some tool in the future that she could use to her advantage?

As long as he was taking his time with whatever it was he preoccupied himself with doing, she could fashion herself a noose. All she needed was to tear the blanket into strips and twist them into materials for a rope. For something that couldn’t fulfill its original purpose, it was certainly making itself useful.

The blanket was surprisingly easy to tear. In fact, she had to be careful not to break any of the strips in half as she was separating them from the rest of the cloth. Age and mildew had certainly done a number on it. The low, but still present, level of focus needed for the task was somewhat relaxing. The sound of fabric shredding, too, was quite satisfying.

When she finished tearing the blanket into workable pieces, she set to twisting individual strands on themselves, then wove three of them each into narrow ropes. She was quite sure that this was how thread was made, based on looking at the ones she used to mend her clothes.

She wound them as tightly as she could without breaking the threads of the fabric, but the strands kept coming unraveled as she worked. When she let go of a fully twisted strip to move onto the next, by the time she turned back to it, the twist had loosened.

She tried knotting them and not twisting them as tightly. Alas, the stubborn pieces of cloth simply would not obey her. They were too thick to stay twisted, and she had no scissors to make them any thinner.

Disobedient little scraps! They were supposed to do as she wanted, not the other way around! She threw the tangled bundle of cloth across the room and out of her face.

She was getting angry at inanimate objects now. How productive.

She groaned and buried her face in her hands. The isolation and darkness would surely drive her to her wits’ end before she had the chance to make her escape. Every passing moment now grated on her nerves, and each minor setback was enough to give her conniptions. If she had to spend another second with only herself and the most deplorable people she had ever had the misfortune to meet for company, she didn’t know what she would do…

What if she never made it out of here?

It was not the first time the thought had come into her mind. Each time the pessimistic words intruded upon her consciousness, they brought with them an increasingly heavy sense of dread. She couldn’t fight, she was far from any friendly face… hell, she couldn’t even manage to kill herself right!

…

She crawled over to the bundle of blanket strips. It wouldn’t do for anyone to come in and notice something amiss. She arranged them into a makeshift seat as she had taken to doing lately. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath.

_Keep your cool. You won’t be able to accomplish anything if you can’t at least do that._

She looked out of her cell. The little flickering light of the lamp had long since run out of fuel. Brief though its life was, it had been something like a companion to her. Even if it couldn’t speak, it had given her a sense of ease.

It wouldn’t be so bad if he came back, if he were to bring with him some oil. She would take anything that would preserve her sanity at this point. It was more important than her pride.

_Knock!_

The sound startled her out of her thoughts. The usual sign of someone’s approach in the unlatching of the lock followed, but the single knock was, well, unexpected, to put it mildly. It was if she weren’t in a jail cell, and she was receiving a perfectly normal visitor rather than a prison guard. She barked with laughter, but cut herself off as she heard the door open.

There was only one person who would do something so strange, and it wasn’t the silver knight who spoke of her like a banshee who hadn’t bathed in a few decades. It had to be the contemptuous weasel who kept his armor immaculate for no one in particular.

He had brought another lantern with him, too, and when he came into view, she saw a bag held at his side in his other hand. Good. He didn’t intend to use that horrible lift this time. He lifted the darkened lantern off of its hook and hung the other in its place before turning to look at her.

“Good day.”

Was it? She couldn’t tell. She hadn’t seen the sky in over a month, if he wasn’t aware.

“Good day,” she replied.

“Come closer a moment. I have something to give you.” He sounded particularly assured of himself, as though he knew she would do as was asked. If only she had been able to finish her rope, maybe he would get close enough so that she could strangle him with it. Helm be damned, she would find a way.

And there was the issue of the the rope, as well. Its current state wouldn’t go unnoticed. She hesitated.

“I believe I gave you an order,” he said, tone much harder now. So he was only pleasant as long as she did precisely as was told, and promptly. How charming. She got up and walked over, stopping some inches away from the bars.

He looked past her at the blanket scraps.

“What is that? A rat’s nest?” She tried to formulate an acceptable answer, but he beat her to it. “I suppose that is only appropriate.”

If she had any blood in her face, it would be burning for anger and shame. That arrogant little shit! If he hadn’t just delivered an implicit threat to do her bodily harm, she would… she would…

Deep breaths, now. Deep breaths. She was better than this. She was better than her rage.

His helmet turned to his hands so that the gap in his visor, wherever it was, lined up with where the sack he carried was held in his hand. He pulled out the strings and held his hand up to the bars. His gauntlets were too wide to pass through.

“Take them.” She reached over to pull the strings towards herself. They felt rough, like they hadn’t been sufficiently sanded. At least they couldn’t be any worse than the ones the lute had been delivered to her with.

“Before you change those strings, put them down. I have something else to give you.”

Intrigued, she bent down and placed the string by her side.

“Hold out your hand.”

She did so, while he dug through the bag. He pulled out a fist that clutched a handful of… something. She couldn’t see what. He took hold of her wrist and turned it so her palm was facing up, pressing some small, round objects into her hand.

She pulled her hand back to take a look at what they were. They were dark brown, and it had been years since she had seen one of their kind.

Chestnuts.

Her shoulders began to shake. She could take the barbed remarks, even if it made her seethe. She could pretend that he said nothing, pretend that killing him wasn’t the first thing she would do once she was out. She could fake passivity, but not at _this_.

“Is this some sort of joke?” she managed to get out. She couldn’t tell what sort of face he was making, as always. Smirking like a fool at the little human who can’t do a thing but thank him, she’d bet every last soul she had. She'd get them back. They had to be sitting around somewhere.

“What?”

Mocking her by acting as if he was taken aback, was he? She wouldn’t fall for something so obvious. She threw the chestnuts on the floor. They bounced, scattered, and rolled to the corners of the cell.

“Do you want me to eat them in front of you, too? I suspect you’d get a laugh out of that!” She whipped around. She couldn’t leave, but she could ignore him.

“Prisoner! Do not turn your back on me!”

Forget it. She couldn’t ignore him.

“Why would you bring me food?! I don’t imagine it was out of the goodness of your heart,” she hissed.

“Why would I…? So you could eat it, you damnable fool! Do you not see that I am doing you a kindness?” He slammed his hand against the bars. She jumped, but did her best not to think of what that would mean for her. She covered her nervousness with a sneer.

A _kindness_. Was that how he saw it?

“In all the stories about Ornstein the Dragon Slayer, not one said that he was a _liar_.”

“I do not follow,” he told her, hand still on the bars, “Explain.” Was that how he wanted it? He wanted her to spell it out?

“I’m undead. Not alive?” she said, with a shrug and insincere smile. “If I eat _that_ ,” she pointed to a stray chestnut, “it will rot in my stomach. It will putrefy until I cannot bear the smell and am forced to vomit it out. Nowhere for that to go in a place as small as this, is there?”

She tensed up in anticipation of him striking her with lightning. It was worth it. If she hadn’t blown off a little of the steam she had been collecting she would have done something even more stupid than yell at him.

But the lightning didn’t come. The tense seconds ticked by, and still, nothing. He hadn’t moved an inch.

She wished she could see past that _damned_ helmet to gain a little insight into what he was thinking.

“I… I did not know that.” For once he didn’t sound contemptuous, proud, or coldly angry. He sounded almost meek. No, that wasn’t right. Apologetic? Impossible.

“My intention was to repay you, not to insult you.”

Repay her...?

The entire situation was so absurd, she could laugh. She knew better than to do that, but under different circumstances, she wouldn’t be able to contain it.

“I was under the impression that human women liked chestnuts,” he said without a hint of anything aside from absolute seriousness, as if that weren’t the most ridiculous sentence ever to have been spoken. She couldn’t laugh. She _must not_ laugh.

“Next time, I shall bring something more appropriate.”

And she would try not to snap at him next time when he brought her an armful of writhing serpents. His intentions weren’t plainly cruel as they seemed, but she still didn’t know why he was doing this. To assuage his guilt? She was inclined to think he did not feel such things. He couldn’t feel indebted to her for the music. He had already made it abundantly clear that he thought humans were disposable and troublesome creatures.

She walked backwards, so that she was still facing him, towards the end of the cell to pick up the lute. Best not set him off again for no reason. She approached the bars again, closer to the source of light, and took a seat, crossing her legs, to begin working on removing the dried out catgut.

The plates of his armor clattered and clanked against themselves as he sat down opposite her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bitches love chestnuts.
> 
> It took two weeks. AGAIN!
> 
> enjoyex.tumblr.com (NSFW)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I received some incredible fanart from [voids](http://archiveofourown.org/users/voids/pseuds/voids)! Check it out [here!](http://dauded.tumblr.com/post/151760953491/i-drew-something-inspired-by-a-dark-souls-fic)
> 
> Enjoy some exciting Ornstein perspective. I bumped the rating for language.

It was clear to Ornstein that the prisoner was making a point of ignoring him. No one put so much energy into removing strings from a lute. She exhibited an abnormal amount of focus as she pried the dried catgut from the tuning pegs.

He cleared his throat. She looked up, neck still straining unnaturally even with the relative difference in their height lessened by him sitting on the floor.

“Yes?” she prompted, voice taking on a falsely saccharine cadence. She had a smile plastered on her face, though it looked more like the grimace of corpse, the skin of which has begun to dry up and peel away from its teeth. The effect was… less than pleasant.

“You do not wish to speak?” he asked, hoping to incite some manner of conversation. He had not come all the way down to the dungeons just to have her scream at him for an honest mistake. Her toothy grin went even wider at his words.

“What could possibly make you think that?”

She was being insolent. Even more so than usual.

Her choleric temperament was awfully troublesome. It left her far too industrious to make an ideal prisoner and her attitude too sharp to make a decent minstrel. There couldn’t be a single person who found her genuinely pleasing to be around. How she had found any work was beyond his reckoning. Human standards for their entertainers must not be very high.

She returned to the task at hand without awaiting his response. Did she not realize the position she found herself in? She was fortunate that there was a set of bars separating the two of them.

…

No. He wouldn’t raise his hand against something he now knew to be harmless. Her lack of respect for authority figures, while irritating, posed no real threat when she had no fellow prisoners to incite.

All bark and no bite, but she wasn’t at all canine in the way she acted. He couldn’t discern her physiognomy through the decrepitude of her flesh, but if he was able, he imagined it would be shrew-like: pinched features, suspicious eyes, and a general sharpness of appearance. A beast whose nature was to snap.

Her fingers moved deftly in that regular way a practiced hand did. With those motions came the dull tone of tapping on hollowed-out wood.

_Tok._

_Tok._

_Tok._

The steady rhythm of her movements made the sounds vaguely musical. He closed his eyes. The inside of his helmet was growing overly warm from the damp that permeated the air, and the layer of clothing he wore was far from sufficient to cushion him from the edges of his armor against the stone ground. Despite these things, there was still a comfort to be had from being seated beside the flickering oil light of the lantern that was too small to give off heat.

_Tok._

_Tok._

_Tok._

“… speak of?” Her raspy voice broke through his brief spell of placidity.

“Yes?”

_Tok._

“I said, ‘If you were to speak, what would you speak _of?_ ’”

Oh. What _was_ it that he wanted to speak about?

He just wanted to speak; to have a conversation, to be precise. He didn’t mind what the topic was, not really. But if he had to choose something…

_Tok._

“Lately, my thoughts have often turned to a good friend I once had.”

A good man. An honest man. An admirable person of strong character, and very likable.

_Tok._

“Well? What was he like?”

~~~~~~

Ornstein had never been fond of the hunting dogs.

His Lord’s son had always spoken highly of them, gazing proudly at the snarling creatures and commending their loyalty. Ornstein always made sure to voice his agreement, of course, but as he looked into their shining, beastly eyes, he could not help but think that such virtues as loyalty were just the wishful thinking of men projected onto the animals.

Nevertheless, the Young Lord saw something in them beyond their usefulness in hunting. Ornstein stood under the yard’s lone tree a short ways away to avoid the mud of the kennels that would no doubt besmirch his boots. The wet, early morning chill seeped into his bones, the sun hardly high enough to burn away the mist.

The Young Lord tossed meat to the barking beasts, laughing in that great, booming way he did as they jumped towards his hands with snapping, slavering jaws. He wiped his hand on the leg of his pants and walked over to where the guard watched from.

“Look at them, Ornstein! You can tell they know we’ll be bringing down impressive game today,” he said with a smile.

By the noise they were making, the dogs did indeed seem excited.

“I agree, my lord.”

The Young Lord took a theatrical step back and covered his chest as if he had just been struck by an arrow.

“My lord?! I’ll not be having my friend call me in such a way!”

He clapped Ornstein hard on the back and laughed at his slight jump. He was a giant of a man, a full head taller than Ornstein, who was not small by any measure.

~~~~~~

“Wait a moment!” the prisoner cried.

“… What is it?”

“How tall could he have been? I hardly even reach your waist.”

He did his best to size her up, seated as she was.

“About double your own height, perhaps?”

She was dumbfounded, and he took the opportunity to continue.

~~~~~~

“My lord?! I’ll not be having my friend call me in such a way!”

“Of course,” he assured him.

“Then, o friend of mine, walk with me! Let us see how the rest of our merry party is faring, shall we?”

Ornstein fell in step beside him, keeping up with his purposeful stride. The rest of the hunting party were likely spread all about the grounds, readying the horses and supplies. Not much one for hunting himself, Ornstein was content to follow to whomsoever his friend felt like checking up on. He was just glad to be back on cobbled ground.

His friend seemed keen to head out as early as possible to beat the morning crowds of the city on the way out the Gate of the Sun. If there was someone in the castle who could be trusted with knowing late night and early hour traffic patterns, it was the Great Lord’s oft absent son. And speaking of…

“Where were you earlier this week, if you do not mind my asking? Your lord father was beside himself at your absence. You were gone some days.”

His friend scoffed. “Sometimes I wonder if you are my serious friend or my serious mother hen. I was not up to mischief, if that was his concern.” His grin quickly returned to his face. “I was simply having a bit of fun.”

~~~~~~

“Ah. I am unsure if I should say what…” he could not help but trail off.

_Tok._

“This may come as a something of a surprise to you, but you aren’t actually the first man I’ve ever met,” she said.

“Right.”

_Tok._

~~~~~~

“You were _in town_ then?” Ornstein asked with some amusement. His friend draped his arm around him and raised a hand to cover his mouth and whispered conspiratorially.

" _Yes, well… let us just say, this one was particularly lovely._ ”

~~~~~~

“He didn’t say that,” she said, without missing a beat.

_Tok._

“… Excuse me?”

“There’s less than a one in one million chance those were the words he used. I don’t know this man, but he didn’t say that. If I had any money on me at the moment, I would bet it all on that.”

_Tok._

He coughed.

“Those… might not have been his _exact_ words, no.”

~~~~~~

“ _Her cunt was tighter than any I’ve had, let me tell you_ ,” he leaned away as Ornstein did the same, albeit with much more urgency. He was more than a little relieved he kept his face covered.

“Truly, you ought to come with me next time! Worry not, I’ll pay! You deserve a break every once in a while.”

“That is a generous offer, but I am… fine without taking you up on it. Thank you.”

The Young Lord was a man of, er, _impressive_ appetites. Ornstein had seen him pack away _multiple legs_ of lamb in a single evening, not to mention the entire casks of ale he imbibed on a semi-regular basis. It was more than enough to kill a lesser man. Those appetites were not limited to food and drink. Like a rising storm, he swept up everyone around him. They were unalike in that respect.

“I know, I know,” he said, shrugging and shaking his head. “You’re a disciplined man. I respect that.” They began walking again. “But no maids? No wine? I can’t imagine such a life.” He stroked his chin. “I’m certain you’re the only knight so tied to his vows.”

The only knight? Ornstein thought of his three companions.

While he didn’t find dogs and wolves to seem as faithful as his friend praised them as being, Artorias embodied the sentiment of his sigil to a degree even Ornstein found outstanding.

And to Ciaran’s credit, she had the sort of ruthless efficiency one could expect of an assassin. Honor was less of a concern for those like her, but she was nonetheless an exemplary knight in performance.

Gough was personable, but prideful, as those possessing such a high level of skill often were. Ornstein knew it would be hypocritical to rebuke him for it. He did his best to avoid the pitfalls of vanity, but he knew that he was not always successful. How perfectly ironic that a Lion Knight should be proud.

Whether any of his comrades were in breach of their knightly vows was something he had no desire to think on overlong.

“I trust in their good judgement,” was all he said in reply. That seemed to amuse the Young Lord very much, for he got quite a laugh out of that.

“Playing your cards close to your chest, as always. Just as well, I wouldn’t want to learn my good friend had changed overnight!”

In the distance, the low, drawn-out sound of a hunting horn resounded.

“They must have the horses saddled and weapons readied. Well? Are you ready to take down one of those famous boars?” Ornstein stopped in his tracks.

“Famous boars? You cannot mean… one of the Duke’s boars?” Lord Gwyn wouldn’t like that. Not one bit.

“Of course I do! Come now, what use could that lizard have for such a grand beast? I won’t be satisfied until I take one down and have its roasted haunch on a plate before me!”

Ornstein looked to his left and right to make sure no one was about to overhear his words.

“Well, I do admit that I am not the Duke’s most _ardent_ supporter.”

“Truly? I never thought I’d hear those words from a man who hangs his dragon head trophies in every room he is able!”

Ornstein gave him a deep bow.

~~~~~~

_Tok._

“I know of those boars,” she said. “I’ve encountered one on my travels, though it was armored.” She laid the last of the old strings on a small pile she had been forming, then blew some dust away from the lute.

“You have? Nearby?”

She picked up the bundle of new strings and pulled one away from the rest of them.

“Hard to say. It’s been a while since I’ve been outside.”

…

The silence dragged on as he thought on what to do about her disrespect.

Perhaps he was mistaken to have recounted this story to her. She was taking it as an invitation to be even more brazen, such that it was clear she was forgetting who was beneath whom in the chain of command.

He stood, picking up the lantern off its hook and looping it and its extinguished brother on his fingers. He could see her expression shift into one of even greater distaste.

“What are you…? I won’t be able to work if you take that!”

He tapped his fingers against the bars and watched her physically recoil like a stricken animal.

“Then maybe you ought to watch your tone.”

She nodded vigorously, but he knew it wouldn’t be long before she took the attention he paid her as a sign that they were equals once more.

He sighed. There had to be some simple way for her to remain a prisoner in while also acting as an entertainer. Were those things really so mutually conflicting?

Her arms rose up to cover her head. She was groveling, whimpering, and he couldn’t help but feel a wave of disgust as he thought of the filth that must be coating the floor.

“Get up. Don’t you humans have any dignity?”

Her small noises of terror stopped abruptly, and she looked up at him. He couldn’t see into her eyes, for there were no eyes.

But he could still see the hate that filled them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So now we know he's a celibate knight.
> 
> I should write a spin-off fic where pre-nameless Nameless King and Ornstein go out for a crazy night of drinking and whoring. Maybe. If that weren't a silly (but precisely my sense of humor type of) idea.
> 
> Happy Halloween!
> 
> enjoyex.tumblr.com (NSFW)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More delicious [fanart](http://dauded.tumblr.com/post/152722819956/i-love-this-fic-so-much-heres-a-bit-more-of) for your eyeballs by [voids](http://archiveofourown.org/users/voids/pseuds/voids), this time of Chapter 7!
> 
> Just wanna put out there that this chapter has suicide/more violence than before for all you peeps that would like to avoid that hot mess.

She had finally completed the noose.

Ultimately, she resigned herself to knotting the strips of cloth together. She was no weaver; without light, the task had proven to be insurmountable. Fumbling in the darkness was no way to go about something for the first time. And her desperation, her need to complete what she had begun, had not made it any easier.

She held the rope-like mass loosely in her hand. Though the blanket strips had no stake in her plan to escape, it almost seemed as though they actively worked against her. Crumbling. Slipping. Breaking from even the smallest amount of pressure.

No. She was no weaver.

And as she found out, she was no hangman either.

All she knew of the most deadly knot was that it appeared to wind round its tether many times. That, and that the loop itself should be secure, so its diameter did not change with significant weight applied to it.

It took a good thirty to forty fruitless attempts at replicating it based on hazy memory to finally make her relent. No one could tell her that she hadn’t tried, right? Maybe with light, she could have done better. But there was no way to know.

Perhaps there was just a bit of irony in the fact that after her attempt to fight for the lantern, restringing the lute in the dark posed no challenge at all. The outline of the instrument’s pale face was just visible in the corner. It watched over her actions in silence.

She approached it and lay her hand upon its frets briefly. She couldn’t tie a noose in the dark, but she could string a lute. Cold comfort.

…

She tied each side of her blanket rope to the horizontal bar at about the height of her collarbone. A setup like this would just have to do.

She gave it a firm tug. There was minimal give. Good. She may not be able to make a rope, but she could at least tie a decent knot.

She turned around and sidled up to the bars so her back was flush against them, then slipped the makeshift noose around her neck.

She lifted her left leg and jammed her ankle through the lowest set of horizontal bars, then gripped the bars at the height of her neck so she could force her right foot through, as well. The tips of her toes barely reached the floor outside the cell.

Her position was secure. All she had to do now was let go of the bars.

_Think of the last bonfire you were at. You’ll be there soon._

When she released her hold, it all happened faster than she thought possible.

Her whole body lurched forward, but her neck didn’t snap. She hadn’t been suspended from high enough up for that.

Her throat compressed beneath the pressure of the rope. She felt the ligaments and arteries in her neck shift, constricting her trachea.

She tried to breathe, but the actions of her lungs and diaphragm couldn’t meet up with those in her mouth and upper throat. They spasmed independently of each other, accomplishing nothing.

She fought down the desire to bring her hands up underneath the rope, but she couldn’t stop her legs from kicking out. Her knees jerked and wrenched her trapped ankles, which twisted in their metal confines. The joints ground together. They felt hot... So hot.

They were burning!

They were burning, and she couldn’t even scream.

Before the deep pumping of blood in her ears overtook all other sound, there was a soft and distant snapping that she could feel more than she could hear.

Her deeply sunken eyes throbbed with the blood trapped in her head and her tongue felt twice as large as usual. She didn’t realize just how much blood was left in her body, and every drop of it roared like a waterfall contained in her skull.

…

How long could humans last without breathing?

Her lungs were exhausted from thrashing in her chest. They felt as though they were about to collapse inward.

The rope on her neck felt like white hot sandpaper, grinding, twisting, tearing…

Tearing.

Tearing!

The last threads severed with a harsh snap, and for one beautiful instant, she could breathe as much as she wanted. But the ground raced up to meet her face, relentless, not waiting a moment to let her outstretch her hands.

Her nose slammed into the stone, the cartilage caving in on impact. A searing, burning cold shot through her face.

“AAGHH! FUCK! GODS DAMN IT!”

Blood poured out her nostrils and filled her open mouth. She turned her head and it smeared across her cheeks.

She grasped at her face and – _shit!_ – it did not feel good. Her cheeks, mouth, and chin were soaked in blood. Rivulets found the spaces between her fingers and ran down them.

Her nose wasn’t concave or flat, but it also wasn’t anywhere close to the same shape it used to be. She pinched the bridge of it hard to stop the flow of blood. It was already running back into her throat, globules moving up from the back of her mouth onto her tongue. She spat them out along with coppery saliva.

Her feet were still trapped between the bars as she tried to scrabble into a position lying on her side. She managed to prop herself up on an elbow. Each movement jostled her nose, sending through it a fresh wave of pain.

She used the arm supporting herself to shove herself up into a half-kneeling position, her legs still locked in place so that she couldn’t sit. One ankle wasn’t completely swollen, and she managed to angle it out without too much difficulty given that she didn't have use of her hands. She could at least half-sit on her thigh now. One arm was free.

She looked up at the bars, but most of the rope was gone. Only the left knot remained. The rope hadn’t torn down the middle, but close to where she had tied it to the bars on one side. She stretched upwards to dislodge it. The other piece had fallen down beside her. Useless piece of shit.

She picked it up and wiped her face where her other hand wasn’t covering, away from her wound. Aside from the damage to the tissue beneath her skin, she could feel that the thin covering of dry flesh over the bone was torn.

So much for her ambitious escape plan. Fucking rotten blanket.

Extracting her other foot was a more arduous task by half. She winced as she tried to get her more damaged ankle through the gap. It seemed as if it had swelled up to the width of her knee, but she couldn’t just leave it in there and stay lying on the floor. If her bones had fit the first time, she could get this mass of flesh out now.

She braced her other foot against the bars and pushed against it while pulling on her trapped leg.

Her teeth dug into her lip, but that pain was nowhere near enough to distract from the agony that was the slow drag of her broken ankle between two bars of unyielding iron. The fractured bone grated against itself, splintering even further. She could hear a crunching noise coming from it.

Couldn’t she just gnaw it off with her teeth? That might be easier.

But after far too long, it came through, and she flopped to her side, hand still pinching her nose shut. She gasped and panted through her mouth, grateful again for the stale air in this jail.

She had thought she didn’t have that much of any fluid in her, so the deluge out of her nose had to be close to stopping. Her fingers were numb and stuck to her skin with dried blood, cracking and dusty. A clot stuck to her palm and came out her nostril along with a few more drops. She dropped arm to her side and rolled onto her back to stare into the darkness above her.

She smiled.

Sometimes it felt as if her life had been set up as some sort of comedy for someone with a terrible, morbid sense of humor. A joke for those absent gods who made mockery of humans to all have a good laugh at.

And it was fair.

After all, if she were in their position, she would find all this misfortune funny. The sheer amount of it was absurd. A true farce.

There was blood spattered all over the floor. Amusing.

She wiped her face with a blanket with which she had just tried to kill herself. Hilarious.

“Ha ha!”

Her loud laugh surprised her at first, but it was natural, wasn’t it? Each and every thing that happened here was all contributing to a comedy of errors, and now she was privy to it.

Her converted grain-sack of a tunic was absolutely _coated_ in gore. Nothing upsetting about that. No, no.

She laughed.

It _was_ funny. Oh, it was _so terribly_ hilarious! Maybe only she got the joke, maybe only she was in on it all, for only she was in the cell, after all. But didn’t that make it all the better?

Something to laugh about just for her. No one took the time to make the prisoner laugh. She had to do it all herself, so how fitting that it would be about her, at her expense, and for her benefit. She was the actor and the audience, spellbound, captive…

_Captive._

She just laughed, and laughed. It was getting hard to breath for all her laughter.

_Don’t stop laughing, though! What will you if you stop laughing?_

“Ha ha ha ha!”

She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know.

She draped an arm across her eyes. They were wet. The blood must have gotten to them, too.

Now, more than any time since she had first died, she wished she could sleep.

“You seem to be having a good time.”

Ah.

“Hee hee. Oh, not really.”

“No?”

She moved her arm and peered up at the half-lit, sneering lion helm far above her.

“There seems to be quite a bit of blood on your face for it to be ‘nothing.’”

She rubbed at her cheek and felt dried blood flake off.

“Aha. So there is.”

“And?”

She tried to go over what had just happened without dissolving into peals of laughter.

The rope split. Right, right.

Broken nose. Yes. That’s where all the blood on her face was from.

Broken ankles? They did hurt. One more than the other.

Her thoughts felt like they were moving slowly across her mind, swimming through sludge, weighed down by _something_.

Ornstein cleared his throat to grab her attention.

“I think you may be experiencing delirium from blood loss.”

Delirium?

Delirium.

_Delirium?_

No, that didn’t seem right. She didn’t have much blood to begin with. What did it matter if she lost a little bit more?

_CLANG! CLANG!_

He clapped his hands together, startling her.

“I was going to give this to you _after_ you played some music and showed a bit of contrition for our last encounter, but I’d best give it to you now.”

Shitty, shitty bastard. He was awful. If her thoughts weren’t progressing at the speed of mud, she’d think of some clever insult.

“Sit up if you can. I can guarantee you’ll like this a bit more than what I brought you last.”

He pulled the thing from a pocket beneath his armor this time, not from a bag. He held it in his closed fist, pointed down as if he wanted no contact with her and would simply drop it in her hand.

She looked at those hands of hers. It was no surprise. They looked as if she had just used them to rip someone apart.

She leaned onto her forearm and was awash with sudden dizziness. She blinked several times to try to clear her head, to no avail.

She grasped in front of her, and by some miracle, her hand reached the bars and let her pull herself up. Her upper body followed the momentum and her forehead bumped into the bars, but she was too tired to sit up properly.

“Put your hand out.”

She did, and he carefully placed something that had almost no weight at all in her hand. It was squirming without actually moving enough to get away from her in her dazed state. It felt… deeply familiar.

“This is something I know for certain you humans to be fond of. Or perhaps ‘fond of’ is not quite correct.”

She brought it back to her chest and gazed with lowered lids at its dark, undulating surface. A tiny black sprite.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy, this chapter. Not a big fan of most of it, to be honest. Blargh. Take my word vomit.
> 
> enjoyex.tumblr.com (NSFW)


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a one-shot based on this now! It's got some of that good, good Chosen Undead/Ornstein angst, and Smough! [Windows](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9954422) by [voids](http://archiveofourown.org/users/voids/pseuds/voids)!
> 
> It's a related work, so it'll be at the end of the most recent chapter from now on. Definitely check it out!

She struggled to make sense of the shock: both that of her wounds and at what lay in her hand. The thing wriggled tirelessly, so unlike any inanimate object ought to.

She squinted at it, sharpening the double-images dancing before her, merging them into one solid vision. It was releasing glass-sliver sparks from a corona of white light, the foggy halo that enshrouded the thickness of its inky depths. Like a will-o’-the-wisp, its edges rose and fell in the same manner as a flame while being cool to the touch.

Her eyes and hands, or her mind, had to have been playing her false. It simply could not be.

Could it?

If it was what it appeared to be, this was certainly a gift far more enigmatic than any he had thought to bring her before. Had he any idea just what this sprite was capable of?

Surely not! He would never have brought it within her reach, knowing what it would allow her to do.

But, it was not as if there was a bonfire she had access to in here. Any use she could get from it was likely precisely what he had intended in giving it to her.

He seemed aware of the fact that it would alleviate the pain she was in. Yes, perhaps even that it would heal her injuries. So did it really matter whether she accepted or not? It was hard to tell what could go wrong should she use it. 

And yet…

She could not shake her feeling of uncertainty, her doubt. She chanced a brief glance at him, still outside her cell. Any indication of intent was masked.

Of course.

He appeared to have noticed her gaze, though it had not lingered. He pointed at her hands, now cupped together in the manner one would gingerly hold a captured firefly.

“You _do_ know what that is, do you not?” he asked, and oh, how the sarcasm leaked into his tone! Such was the apparent frustration at her reluctance to make any sort of move or speak.

Her fingers sank into its surface, a resistance like the thinnest skin round water. The merest contact drove tremors through it.

He did not seem keen to wait for a reply.

“You must. You _are_ a _human_ , after all.”

Those words were contorted by deep disdain, as if they had been forced through a sneer. Whispering echoes seeped out from them, still perfectly audible to the undead:

A human is a truly contemptible thing. A human would not hesitate to slaughter one of its own for what was now within her grasp. Indeed, there was no honor in a human.

Only “humanity.”

She tightened her grip around it, and the surface tension broke, releasing a cloud of vapor. For a moment, white steam and black smoke were suspended in the air around her, then rushed to coalesce beneath the mass of mottled flesh upon her breast.

A wave of dense air radiated from the telltale mark to her extremities – not warm, nor cold, but deep as the sea. Deep, and possessing a vestigial familiarity. The film clouding her vision cleared, and the leaden weight was lifted from her limbs. The crust of half-dried blood remained of course, but her face and ankle no longer felt, well, broken.

And that was enough, even if she had no way of reaching out to a drifting comrade in a transient land. This, she assured herself, was better than nothing.

“Well?” his voice cut through.

Well what?

She picked up a scrap of blanket, spat on it, and wiped her face. She was tired, and in no mood to entertain his desire for gratitude or anything like it.

“Not a single word of thanks? … I suppose that’s typical.”

Oh my. Talkative today, wasn’t he? Must like the sound of his own voice quite a bit.

She ceased rubbing the drying blood for a single moment, lowered her rag, and inclined her head toward him. Slightly.

It was enough to shut him up for a few more minutes, anyway.

Unfortunately, that alone wasn’t quite enough to make him leave. He was simply… standing there, arms crossed, seemingly waiting for her to finish cleaning up.

Right. He would not have come without some cause.

“You wanted me to play for you?” she asked at last.

“Ah.” His arms fell to his sides. “Yes.”

Didn’t have much to say now that she was actually talking, hmm?

She rose to retrieve the lute from the corner where she had rested it last. Never thought she’d have to touch the sorry thing again.

Hmph.

“Still no song you want to hear in particular?” She dropped back down near the bars of the cell, blanket and blood strewn in a little circle around her. She began to tune.

He rested a hand against his helm, over where his cheek would be. Contemplative.

“Perhaps a… well, a nostalgic song might be nice.”

…

A what? A _nostalgic_ song? Whose nostalgia would that be, then? _His?_

She doubted there was anything she knew that would be properly reminiscent of an age long past. Religious music, perhaps? It was hardly likely even that would be anywhere close to what he was looking for!

He didn’t like to make it easy for her, did he?

Oh, gods. A _nostalgic_ song.

Here, now.

Certain themes were universal, were they not? It had to be that things like courtly love and pilgrimage could move any heart, for it seemed quite impossible to her to never have at least sighed for the sentiments they evoked. Only the most uncouth would lack that sensitivity, and he _was_ an aristocrat.

She wondered if he missed the court, and the people who had been a part of it.

“How about this?”

She sang for him an old poem, one that had been a favorite of hers as a child. It was about a certain knightess, a sworn sword to a reclusive princess. There were many episodes about how she bravely drove off her lady’s enemies, always without fail. When deceptive suitors came to claim her hand, she aided the princess in contriving tests to reveal their natures.

This poem, too, was about her loyalty, though about how it was both her greatest merit and a source of tragedy.

Even after the princess was long gone, the knightess remained tied to her vows of service, never leaving her post outside her lady’s apartments. The princess’s family moistened their sleeves with tears at the sight of the her unwavering, and impotent, devotion. Her figure struck them as a lonesome one, indeed.

They asked her what her wish was, hoping to allay her great sadness. Her one regret, she told them, was that she might not serve her lady’s memory longer; that one day, her body would fail and, back bent with age, she would be of no use to anyone, much less her dearest one.

They had her transformed into the apple tree, whose wood is the most resilient. In this way, she would be forever constant.

Her strumming slowed to a halt.

“This is why we call the apple the ‘Tree of Fidelity,’” she told him.

She looked up to see that he appeared rather stunned, and not in the way he had when she had played the lute for him last. On that day, he had seemed rather entranced - if it was not simply her ego making her think it so.

She waved her hand to catch his attention.

“Ah… Are you well?”

His armor positively clanged from the speed with which he turned his head towards her.

“What?! Yes!” He shook his head violently back and forth. “Of course I am!” he snapped.

She dropped her plectrum and turned away lest the annoyance on her face be too plain. Why raise his voice over a question so innocuous? Apparently he was both talkative _and_ temperamental today.

She stood and withdrew to the rear of the cell, swallowed up in its shadowy recesses. If he wanted to be that way, then there was no reason she ought to bother with him.

Still, he remained. It was evident that something she had said was distressing to him, when he had seemed perfectly fine until after she had finished her song.

…

_Oh._

Perhaps it _was_ the song. Perhaps it had been a bit… _too_ nostalgic. Or too evocative of memory.

The way he described his past that day had been yearning, it was true. And by its nature, the present was solvent, and dangerous. The future, unknowable.

Despite all those things, here he was, in Anor Londo.

In Anor Londo, forever faithfully by his post. Well. _We all have our duties_ , she supposed.

But for some reason, he served not just faithfully, but admirably. Clad in what was surely ceremonial armor with an immaculate polish, each and every day.

It was…

Puzzling.

It was a mystery _why_ he did what he did.

Anyone could see that the city was empty. She could not possibly know what it had looked like before all those golden deities left, but she imagined the city was much unchanged. The rooms she had seen were all remarkably clean, and nearly every statue was undisturbed in every plinth. It was as if the moment they had disappeared, the city had gone into a state of suspended animation, as if they had stepped away only briefly and could return at any time.

He guarded the Lordvessel, and she wouldn’t leave without it. He guarded it so only the worthiest undead might take it. For it to be claimed would mean his death, would it not? He would not live to see fruits of his labor borne.

So was it that he meant to fight for his life instead? Or was it that he fought to fulfil his duties to the utmost, with a dedication she had not expected?

She found it impossible to resolve his manner of armament with either of these explanations. His reasoning eluded her most tenaciously.

That may have been more frustrating even than her “guest’s” brooding behavior. He had begun to pace just outside the cell. She could not deny that this little spell of mania was amusing to her after all their sour interactions.

Feeling her gaze, he whipped his head back in her direction.

“Yes?” she asked.

He muttered to himself for a moment.

“I can tell that you find me abrasive and arrogant.”

A small cough.

“Well, _aren’t_ you?”

“Of course not! I would think that by now you would find me generous!”

Generous?

No. Gods, no. How could he possibly think that?

“I believe ‘generosity’ is done less to make a person indebted. It’s about selflessness, not reciprocity,” she informed him. Ah, wasn’t she most helpful?

He tapped his foot, the sign that his patience was wearing thin. She should probably hold her tongue from here on out if she wanted to preserve her recently restored constitution. Then again, needling him was about the only thing that had really been entertaining for her in a _long_ time.

“Was I not selfless in how I deigned to do something for someone like _you?_ ”

Someone like you, a human. Someone like you, an undead. How gracious.

“You’ve given me a lute to entertain _you_ , chestnuts I cannot eat,” to alleviate _your_ guilt, “and humanity for- to make me indebted to _you!_ ”

He threw his hands into the air.

“Then what do you suggest I bring you then, hm? A _key?_ ” he demanded, “Your _belongings_ , perhaps?”

By now, he was breathing quite heavily. He continued, giving her no chance to bite back.

“As a matter of fact, I believe I _will_ bring you something of yours. If it will make you less mouthy, I am willing to give anything a try.”

And what was she supposed to say to _that?_ She wasn’t entirely sure how they had come to this point, but he was treating her almost as if she were being… moody. Like she was throwing some childish tantrum and not that she was his indefinite prisoner.

Letting out a self-satisfied “harrumph!” he turned and walked away. He slammed the door shut behind him. He had won _that_ little argument.

“Huh!”

What an odd situation! From the humanity, to his strange episode, and now this declaration: what on earth had all that been about?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What might he bring? It would have to be something feasible, something that wasn’t too obvious, but still useful… A ring would be nice.
> 
> ...
> 
> Fuckin' finally, amirite?
> 
> [enjoyex.tumblr.com](https://enjoyex.tumblr.com/) (NSFW)


	10. Chapter 10

There wasn’t so much to do now. In her idleness, she had rolled up a ball of the less threadbare scraps of blanket. It wasn’t nearly firm enough to bounce against the wall – it was only fabric, after all – so she made as many games as she could based on no more than throwing it into the air and catching it.

_Four-thousand, three hundred and eleven._

_Four-thousand, three hundred and twelve._

Counting the number of throws until her mind wandered and she lost track was a classic.

_Four-thousand, three hundred and thirteen._

_Four-thousand, three hundred and fourteen._

At least it passed the time. Not _well_ , but it did. The ways to entertain herself were limited.

She could always practice her lute-playing, she supposed, but wouldn’t that be far too close to a surrender? And if he showed up while she was, he’d almost certainly be pleased.

She shivered. Best not.

It was true that it hadn’t been long since his last unexpected intrusion, and he did have a tendency of leaving long stretches of time between. But one couldn’t be too careful, and she had long since learned that he had a habit of showing up at the most inopportune times.

She would avoid that if she could. She was still human. She had her dignity. There was no reason to compromise that if there was any way to prevent it.

She couldn’t help but worry – if her dignity, if exercising her agency had fallen to something as trivial as this, was there any point in it at all?

…

Wait. Where was she?

_Four-thousand, three hundred, and… thirteen?_ No, that didn’t seem right.

She had to start over. Yes, those were the rules.

Still, perhaps first a short break was in order. She eased herself onto her side, head resting upon her arm. There wasn’t really enough fat left in it to serve as a pillow. It felt more like resting her head on a branch. It was not very conducive to sleep.

She flipped over to the other arm.

Ah, but if only she _could_ sleep! Even in life, she had had many a night where sleep eluded her; the first rest in an unfamiliar bed had that character to it. When her work compelled her to travel often or to somewhere far away, or she merely found that some hours had passed as she lay awake in bed for no reason at all, she always followed the very same advice.

She couldn’t recall from whom she had heard it first. Perhaps her mother, perhaps someone else; more than one person had told her in her lifetime, she was sure of that. It was to close her eyes and not open them, to lay perfectly still even if she wanted to roll over, and to breathe as slow as she could manage. No matter what she heard, or how much she wanted to move, she followed those instructions.

It hardly ever seemed to work back then, and even the few occasions it did could well have been happenstance. It’s just that it was ingrained so deep in her memory that she couldn’t help but _try._

She had lost count of how many times she had tried since she had died the first time.

She curled up, shut her eyes, and waited. She tried her best not to think.

…

…

…

_SLAM!_

She kept her eyes shut. She’d never manage to fall asleep if she let something like _that_ bother her.

_CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!_

It sounded as if an armed soldier was charging down the corridor, not the familiar composed, effortless gait. It might be someone else, someone who meant to do her harm. She should probably get up, scuttle into the corner. She knew better than to hope that any harm would be lethal at this point, and she had no desire to be subjected to unnecessary pain.

_CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!_

“ _You!_ ”

But, it was the same person as always. Even angered, his voice had a recognizable quality to it. It was terribly, awfully grating. Must he do this now?

_CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! Clink._

His stomping ceased, and just as she cracked an eyelid open, he delivered a sharp kick to the bars. She could feel the vibrations in the floor.

“ _What is the meaning of this?!_ ” he shrieked.

“Of what?”

He thrust his clenched fist forward, banging against the bars. His shoulders were trembling with rage.

“How _dare_ you lay there and ignore me! Get up and come forth at once!”

She yawned.

“Rrgh… _Now!_ Do not make me _repeat_ myself, prisoner! I have been lenient with you so far, but,” he raised his free hand, which emitted crackling sparks, “Do not mistake generosity as an invitation to insolence!”

Pleasant fellow, wasn’t he? Well, it was either go over to him and get the chance not to be struck by lightning, or stay where she was and have it happen for certain. She stretched, pulled her knees in, and stood up.

“ _Faster!_ ” he snapped. “I haven’t got all day!” He slammed his fist against the bars again and she slinked up. Even without seeing his face, she could tell that he looked like he wanted to strike her. He opened his hand.

“What are these?” he demanded.

He asked that as if she could see what “these” were. It was dark. They were in a _dungeon_ , for gods’ sakes!

“I don’t know.”

“ _Liar!_ ” _CLANG!_ “These were among your belongings, and I can’t imagine they fell in among them by themselves.”

She squinted at his hand, and sure enough, there were three dim outlines of objects atop his palm.

“Tell me where you stole these from immediately.”

Whatever they were, they were small, and seemed… metallic, like there was a tiny bit of light from the open door reflected off of them. Were they rings?

“I could only tell you that if I had stolen them in the first place.”

_CLANG!_

“Cease your lies, you… you snake! I know beyond doubt that these do not belong to you, and you _will_ tell me how they came into your possession!”

She wanted to scream. Of course she had rings! But three rings that infuriated him to know that she owned? Just what was he on about?

Sparks began to fly from his opposite hand once more. She squashed the urge to take a step back. It wouldn’t stop her from receiving the blow in any case. It would only incite him further.

“I didn’t steal them. I found them.”

Well, it was true enough. She found many things on her travels. Most of them were on dead bodies – it wasn’t as if useful things popped out of thin air! – but she was still living, more or less, and they were not.

He did not seem particularly amused by that answer.

“You claim not to be a thief, but I happen to know very well to whom these belong. That makes you both a thief, _and_ a liar. I know I shouldn’t be, but somehow, I always find myself shocked by the lows to which you humans seem determined to sink. Always out to save your own skin at the expense of others.”

She bit down on the inside of her lips to stay her tongue.

“ _These_ ,” he jerked his wrist, “belong to men and women of a greater kind than you could possibly conceive of.”

Oh really? At least she had a good idea which rings those were now. It made sense that all this would prove to be such a personal affront to him. He turned his head away from her in disgust.

Ah, but… Maybe he was angry enough to kill her now.

“It’s more than evident just how blinded by greed you are. They did more for your kind than you’ll ever know, and _this_ is how you repay them?”

_Maybe…_

She let out a derisive, “Hmph. And what? You expect me to care about that?”

The hand with the rings curled right back into a fist.

“And how many hundreds of years ago did they die? Care to take a guess? Am I supposed to be _eternally grateful_ for something done for a few humans I’ll never meet? A ring on a corpse is a ring on a corpse. It’s not as if they were doing them any good.”

And they weren’t! She, on the other hand, stood to benefit from them. She _could_ do something for “her kind,” as he so graciously put it. Even if she didn’t lift a finger for anyone’s interests but her own, one more person was helped than would be otherwise.

She exposed her teeth at him in a grin.

“I’m pragmatic that way.”

He took a half-step back as if she had physically attacked him.

Then, quick as a snap, he reeled back and threw his body weight into the bars with an enormous _CRASH!_ He tried to force his arm betwixt the bars, straining to grab at her.

Had he forgotten that he could shock her without much effort?

“You _bitch!_ ”

He slammed himself against the bars again, and this time, they scraped against the stone in which they were embedded. Sparks flew from where his armor grinded against iron.

He pulled away once more before dealing a third full-body blow to the bars. They groaned with protest, and stone chipped off of the floor.

Oh yes. He was angry enough.

The fourth time sent the entire frame hurtling toward her; the door, the bars, and chunks of concrete that clung to where it had been torn from its sockets. The layer of conductive stone splintered, flying in all directions.

She jumped back to avoid being caught beneath it, falling right before her toes. He leapt forth, upon her immediately.

He raised his hand and shoved her by the shoulder to the rear wall. She smacked into it, and in her second of dazedness was forced into the wall again as he pinned her there by the head. The metal covering his fingertips bored into her sallow cheeks and forehead, bruising her skull beneath. He was covering her nose and mouth completely.

“Can you give me one reason that I should not kill you this very moment?”

“Vwhy youf _shoulvn’t_ kull muh?” He pulled his palm away from her mouth while tightening his grip on the edges of her face. She drew in a gasping breath.

She knew what to do. Oh, she knew what would make him kill her.

She sucked all the phlegm and saliva from the back of her throat and mouth onto her tongue. Glaring directly into the eyes of his helm, she spat a tremendous wad of the most foul, dry, and dense spittle onto his hand. If you could halve the amount of water in what you’re imagining, and halve it again, it would approach the consistency of what had attached itself to the cloth underside of his gauntlet.

She felt the pressure holding her to the wall relax instantly.

Slowly, oh, so slowly, he released that crushing grip from her and turned his hand to inspect it. He stared at it for a moment.

And a moment stretched into two, and then a few seconds. She had thought he would scream at her, or shock her with lightning, or ignore it and trap her again… anything really!

A strange noise came from inside his helm. Had he just coughed? No, no.

He was retching.

That wasn’t _quite_ what she expected. He seemed less angry than he seemed just utterly revolted. So revolted that he had actually let go of her for more than seemed natural, given the situation.

That meant that he was distracted. Very much so.

The bars lay demolished. There was nothing keeping her in.

He was distracted.

She mustered all the strength in her arms and shoulders and shoved him aside. He stumbled.

She ran past him, over top the bars.

Out the cell. Turned.

Skidded slightly. Regained herself.

Down the hall. Her feet smacking against the floor. The door was still open. The door was unlocked!

She ran and ran. Didn’t stop running. _Couldn’t_ stop running. She heard the clanking footfalls start up behind her, but didn’t slow down.

It was so bright ahead of her.

_Oh gods, if you deliver me from here, I’ll devote the rest of this strange life to serve you!_

She was out the threshold. She didn’t know where she was or where any of her things were except three rings that were probably lost for good, but she couldn’t stop.

There were stairs ahead of her. She had to keep running. She ran up curved staircase, and it grew brighter and brighter as she did.

At the top was a wooden door. Unlocked. She threw it open. A large room.

Looked right. Nothing.

Looked left. The door, a hall.

She made to sprint, and a slender, silver arm shot out, hitting her in the neck. The momentum knocked her to the ground, and the back of her head slammed into the floor.

And everything went black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man. Fuckin' clotheslined.
> 
> Anyone think I should go back and name the chapters so they're easier to navigate? Lemme know!
> 
> [enjoyex.tumblr.com](https://enjoyex.tumblr.com/) (NSFW)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Windows](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9954422) by [voids](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voids/pseuds/voids)




End file.
